Hi Mark A few points here.
The + symbol was new to the last release its certainly an improvement on what we had before. I don't find any problem with editing the attribute below. It would only be if the text is overlapped with the button that there would be any issue and I'd have thought that rare. When it does occur you can just click on the attribute anywhere and start typing to append to the end. We could move the + symbol outside the bounds of the rectangle but that may then overlap other buttons. Still if you have any suggestions then please raise an issue. Association/Aggregation/Composition is a tricky one as they simply don't map to different concepts in Java and I can't think of a useful way of making them do so. Aggregation is typically some thing made up of parts as opposed to a standard association which can refer to some separate thing. Composition is typically a stronger form of aggregation where deleting an object will delete its composite parts. In Java where you have only variable references and garbage collection these UML concepts don't make so much sense. However from a UML design perspective it can impart knowledge of the design intent to different parties working on the project. Perhaps if a car is "composed" of engine, wheels, etc I might decide that there should never be any external references allowed to any of these parts. So either engine must be private and have no getter or if something calls getEngine() we must return a clone of the Engine. That way when the car is garbage collected the engine will be also GC'd as nothing else can have a reference to it. We can invent such rules but I'd prefer to see some industry wide understanding before we adopted something of our own (then again with a preference setting why not). The public by default situation could also be altered by introducing a new preferences setting so that this default can be set as you like. The Delete button is s tricky one. Nobody is happy whichever way we choose. Once (one day hopefully) we have undo then maybe this will change. The reason Delete does not physically delete is that we had complaints of the opposite problem. People didn't realise that the same class can be in multiple diagrams. They didn't realise that by deleting it from one that it would also be deleted from others. So making the user go to the effort of ctrl-Del seemed safer. You should be able to change this through edit->Settings->ConfigureShortcuts but there seems to be some defect with that when I tried. It might be useful to have a popup wanring on Delete and ctrl-Delete that warns you it will leave behind the model (or will delete the model from all diagrams). Such a prompt should have a check box to say "don't show me this again" but at least the user has at least one warning of its usage. Regarding terms like extends instead of generalization etc. I would hope that a little bit more effort was made to understand UML terminology. If extends is used instead of generalization then what happens to the UML term "extend" in use case diagrams? My view of UML is pretty similar to yours, its a great way to communicate. There does need to be some level of learning the constructs though. Regards Bob ------------------------------------------------------ http://argouml.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=450&dsMessageId=2942654 To unsubscribe from this discussion, e-mail: [[email protected]]. To be allowed to post to the list contact the mailing list moderator, email: [[email protected]]
